It's functionally a bioweapon when Western powers decline to do anything to prevent spread and just buy vaccine doses which don't prevent infections.
The same abundance of caution that lead to the initial success with mitigating the disease as compared to, especially, the US, will also mean they're slower to resume activities that have been put on hold. PRC probably did dodge the big bullet (mass fatalities) with their pre-2022 lockdowns, I don't think they would have ever approached the per capita casualties the US saw if they'd ended most restrictions at the end of Q1 2022 like most of the West did.
The questions that are still up in the air are around "long COVID" mostly. Personally I would not be surprised in the least if the initial vaccines deployed, which only conferred spike protein subunit (S1) antibodies for the variant isolated in Wuhan in late 2019, are biting countries in the ass now. Hoskin's effect or immune imprinting (wiki) are real, well-understood phenomenon that human technology cannot currently overcome, it's why flu vaccines falter during years where vaccines are deployed for other more isolated pathogens that share an evolutionary history with influenza. We already basically know it applies to SARS-COV-2 (well, of course it would, it's a coronavirus) because of a well done Italian study where subjects with memory B cells for a couple of endemic seasonal alphacoronaviruses (NL63 and 229E) had worse COVID-19 outcomes controlling for other factors - so we know that a vaccine series which creates S antibodies and hampers nucleocapsid (N) antibodies (page 23: "(iii) recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination") is going to lead to worse outcomes eventually once the pathogen is sufficiently mutated from the original version that was being targeted in the vaccine.
It's functionally a bioweapon when Western powers decline to do anything to prevent spread and just buy vaccine doses which don't prevent infections.
The same abundance of caution that lead to the initial success with mitigating the disease as compared to, especially, the US, will also mean they're slower to resume activities that have been put on hold. PRC probably did dodge the big bullet (mass fatalities) with their pre-2022 lockdowns, I don't think they would have ever approached the per capita casualties the US saw if they'd ended most restrictions at the end of Q1 2022 like most of the West did.
The questions that are still up in the air are around "long COVID" mostly. Personally I would not be surprised in the least if the initial vaccines deployed, which only conferred spike protein subunit (S1) antibodies for the variant isolated in Wuhan in late 2019, are biting countries in the ass now. Hoskin's effect or immune imprinting (wiki) are real, well-understood phenomenon that human technology cannot currently overcome, it's why flu vaccines falter during years where vaccines are deployed for other more isolated pathogens that share an evolutionary history with influenza. We already basically know it applies to SARS-COV-2 (well, of course it would, it's a coronavirus) because of a well done Italian study where subjects with memory B cells for a couple of endemic seasonal alphacoronaviruses (NL63 and 229E) had worse COVID-19 outcomes controlling for other factors - so we know that a vaccine series which creates S antibodies and hampers nucleocapsid (N) antibodies (page 23: "(iii) recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination") is going to lead to worse outcomes eventually once the pathogen is sufficiently mutated from the original version that was being targeted in the vaccine.